Driving Is Not Enough: Female Emancipation and Masculine Technical Authority in Kristaq Dhamo’s Brazdat (1973)

This article examines how Kristaq Dhamo’s Brazdat (The Furrows, 1973) organises technical knowledge along gendered lines. Through close analysis of framing, montage, dialogue, labour spaces and the tractor’s final breakdown, it argues that the film distinguishes operational competence from diagnostic and repair expertise. Marta, already a skilled seamstress, becomes a tractor driver and gains access to mechanised production, professional recognition and public labour. The final breakdown concentrates this asymmetry: Marta makes a preliminary assessment of the stalled engine and activates the mobile repair infrastructure, while Adem claims diagnostic mastery and performs the intervention that restarts the machine. Situating this ending within Albanian collectivisation, the Sino-Albanian alliance and a transnational socialist iconography extending from Soviet and Czechoslovak cinema to Maoist Chinese tractor-driver narratives, the article argues that Brazdat does not simply abolish gender hierarchy within the technical sphere. It reorganises it: Marta remains at the wheel, while masculine authority is reconstituted through privileged diagnostic and repair knowledge. The case therefore distinguishes technological participation from technological authority: access to the machine does not necessarily entail equal authority over the knowledge that defines competent use. The restarted tractor becomes the material mechanism through which the closing montage suggests reconciliation between Marta and Adem.